Edward Glaeser

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Ed Glaeser is a Research Programme Director for the IGC’s Cities Research Programme.

He is the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard University, where he also serves as Director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government and the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston. He also edits The Quarterly Journal of Economics. He studies the economics of cities, and has written several papers on urban issues, including the growth of cities, segregation, crime and housing markets. He is particularly interested in the role that geographic proximity can play in creating knowlegde and innovation. He received his BA in Economics from Princeton University and his PhD from the University of Chicago (1992).

In 2011, Glaeser published a book, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier which was shortlisted for the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.

Content by Edward Glaeser

Multimedia Item - Video

Professor Ed Glaeser outlines key policy challenges related to the spatial structure of cities in developing countries and the research needed to address them. These ideas are part of the IGC's 'Cities that Work' initiative.

31 Oct 2018

Publication - Policy Brief

This brief outlines the crucial role land rights play in urban development, and explores trade-offs that policymakers face in reforming current tenure systems. It identifies key lessons and best-practices from policy reforms across the developing world.

Multimedia Item - Video

The IGC's Cities that Work initiative was publicly launched at the World Bank on 7 September 2017 with a panel discussing the topic 'Research into Policy to Support Well-Managed Urbanisation’, featuring: Francisco Ferreira (World Bank); Ed Glaeser (IGC and Harvard University); Jennifer Musisi (Kampala Capital City Authority); Tony Venables (IGC and Oxford University);...

20 Mar 2018

Publication - Synthesis paper

This Cities that Work paper first outlines why secure, legally enforceable and marketable land rights play such a pivotal role in urban development. Section 2 discusses the trade-offs associated with different tenure systems, both formal and informal. Whilst there can be strong benefits in formalising land rights, processes of formalisation need to be underpinned by...

Publication - Synthesis paper

This Cities that Work paper explores why land and physical properties represent the largest source of untapped municipal revenue. Alongside their potential to raise significant public revenues, land and property taxes are also fairer and more efficient than other forms of tax. They have limited effects on urban investment, and allow governments to capture increases in land...

Publication - Policy Brief

Part of our Cities that Work publications, this brief outlines the importance of annual land and property tax as a source of municipal finance and explores trade-offs that policymakers face in implementing reform. It also identifies examples of best practice for reform from cities across the developing world.

Multimedia Item - Video

Ed Glaeser, research director of IGC’s cities programme, gives a public lecture about the importance of cities for development and the need for policy to tackle the downsides of density. He also introduces IGC's new research and policy initiative Cities that Work.

Project

Advances in computer vision have made it possible to train predictive algorithms on both structured and unstructured features of image data sets. With good predictive algorithms and robust image data, we can hope to extrapolate even relatively small samples of income or survey data over large areas. In recent work, we have used Google Street View imagery to develop...

Publications Reader Item

Project

The rapid growth of cities in the African continent provides a new opportunity for the spread of innovative ideas and creates the conditions for the accumulation of social capital through repeated interactions. Urban density and social proximity can foster cooperation in the provision of public goods and the creation of win-win solutions which relax the economic constraints...

6 Jul 2016 | Edward Glaeser, Nava Ashraf, Alexia Delfino

Project

Expensive infrastructure is ineffective if it doesn't travel the last mile. In nineteenth-century New York and modern Zambia, disease spread when urbanites chose not to use newly built sanitation infrastructure to save money. Either subsidies or Pigouvian fines can internalise the externalities that occur when people don't use sanitation infrastructure, but with weak...

23 Jun 2016 | Nava Ashraf, Edward Glaeser, Giacomo Ponzetto

Publication - Project Memo

Project

The rapid growth of cities on the African continent brings tremendous economic potential, facilitating the spread of innovation, industry and education. However, this promise is blighted by significant negative externalities associated with big city density, including congestion and contagious disease. There is a view among urban economists that one of the most...

Multimedia Item - Video

Publication - Growth Brief

With rapid urbanisation in the developing world comes contagion, crime, and congestion. Overcoming these is one of the great policy challenges of the 21st century.
This brief outlines why these issues are so important to the prosperity of cities and discusses ways to tackle them, providing useful lessons for policymakers. It also identifies opportunities for...

Project

Urbanisation in Zambia has the potential to help the country to grow from poverty into prosperity
Researchers met with about 50 different stakeholders to understand the country’s urbanisation challenges
With the support of the Zambian government, two urbanisation projects were commissioned from this visit
Developing countries are rapidly urbanising...